When Your Inbox Hurts: A Snapshot of Digital Abuse in Dating

Unspoken and re-spoken, forceful and passive, stinging and seething, relationship abuse has now entered the digital space. Many psychological studies have narrowed in on defining the types of harassment that takes place over media platforms, and why they can be hard to see. The Urban Institute has focused on the ways teenagers communicate differently in the digital age, including the isolating aspect of trying to deepen potentially romantic connections through the screen. Displaying our attachments to these screens – having phones in our pockets or on the table at dinner, or maintaining ten conversations with their own emotional circumstances at once – is a modern reflex. Perpetrators of “digital violence” exploit this nervous tendency to constantly ‘check’ who may be calling our name, and asking us to react to those calls with a meaningful response.

Some of the ways digital abuse occurs are:

• Hacking an email account/stealing passwords
• Stalking through strict surveillance of someone else’s social media presence
• Manipulative or diminishing written exchanges
• Having information sent via text or online saved and distributed or used against you
• Pressuring partners with sexual desire conveyed by photos or other explicit, demanding, and constant messages

Becoming romantically involved with someone values spontaneity and some degree of mysteriousness, but a dialogue that feels off, one-sided, or boundary crossing should not be left alone. Fulfilling relationships should not feel like shadows that influence every way you express yourself.

Abuse can sadly be an inherent part of a bad relationship, and it reproduces itself from a power-driven mind to an even more powerful device. Therefore, there isn’t one medium that should be sending red flags when used in an intimate context, but this kind of harassment might take time to affect a victim and when it does, can be irreversible. One disturbing statistic shows that 1 out of 12 teens not only consider themselves victims of digital abuse, but initiators as well. Before resorting to even mild forms of digital abuse becomes a sort of defense mechanism for coping with a troubled relationship, individuals need to find ways to protect themselves from the many ambiguities technology brings.